We Don’t Scream Enough
Let's get into it.
Are we still talking about the Kevin Hart roast?
I didn’t watch the Kevin Hart roast because I’ve never liked roasts. The entire premise unsettles me a little. We gather in a room, sharpen humiliation into entertainment, then reward the person who cuts the deepest. That’s the game.
Still, like everything else now, I couldn’t avoid the clips.
And some of those “jokes” did not just flirt with the line. They bulldozed through it. Jokes about lynching. Murder. The long and ugly relationship this country has had with race and pain. The kind of humor that asks the audience to suspend its humanity for a second so everyone can keep the party moving.
I could easily turn this into a post about Kevin Hart laughing along. Or about the comedians themselves. Or about celebrity culture and what people will tolerate in exchange for acceptance, relevance, or airtime.
But honestly, the thing that stayed with me had very little to do with them.
It was the terrifying familiarity of laughing when shit just isn’t funny.
Not the roast laugh exactly. But the survival laugh. The “keep it moving” laugh. The laugh you perform when you don’t yet feel safe enough, powerful enough, or clear enough to say: Actually, that hurt me.
That laugh lives in offices.
In marriages.
At dinner tables.
At funerals.
Especially for people who have learned that composure is currency.
I have spent a lot of my life priding myself on not burning bridges. On exiting spaces gracefully. On being “professional.” On maintaining relationships. On being the person who can rise above things.
And to be clear, I still value grace.
But I think sometimes what we call grace is actually performance.
There have been places in my life that gutted me. Jobs that depleted me. Rooms that diminished me. Relationships that confused me. Seasons where I was surviving something profound while simultaneously answering emails, attending meetings, smiling in photographs, and telling everyone I was “good.”
And I was so good at appearing okay that sometimes people never knew they had wounded me at all.
That realization has unsettled me lately.
How many of us have become experts at managing the optics of pain instead of actually tending to it?
We live in a culture deeply uncomfortable with visible grief. We rush people through heartbreak. We medicalize exhaustion. We hand women six weeks to recover from childbirth as if the body and spirit operate on corporate timelines. We expect people to lose parents, siblings, marriages, identities, careers, and immediately become inspirational about it.
We love resilience because resilience keeps everyone else comfortable.
Years ago, I saw this episode of Six Feet Under. Anyone else love that show as much as me? It centered around a family that owned a funeral home, and one of the brothers observed how quickly grieving people were redirected whenever they truly began to unravel. Someone starts sobbing too loudly, and they get guided into another room.
Contain it.
Soften it.
Make it manageable.
He contrasted that with witnessing grief in other countries expressed openly and physically. People screaming. Falling to the ground. Clawing at dirt. Mourning publicly and without shame.
And I remember thinking: we do not scream enough.
Not literally all the time, of course. But emotionally? Spiritually? Collectively?
We do not allow ourselves enough rupture.
Everything in modern life asks us to metabolize pain quickly and privately. To package trauma into lessons before the wound has even closed. To become “better versions of ourselves” on a timeline that makes other people feel less uncomfortable.
Even our language gives us away.
We say someone is “taking it well.”
We praise people for being “so strong.”
We admire those who “handled it with grace.”
But sometimes strength is just dissociation with good posture.
And maybe that’s why those roast clips felt so uncomfortable to me. Because beneath all the celebrity and spectacle was something deeply familiar: people learning, in real time, how to laugh at what hurts… or what angers them… because the show must go on.
I think there is something profoundly human about honest grief. Honest anger. Honest disappointment. Honest acknowledgment that something wounded you.
Not performative vulnerability.
Not public unraveling for attention.
Not weaponized pain.
Just truth.
Just the courage to stop pretending every hard thing was fine simply because you survived it.
What if we admitted that some experiences did not “make us stronger” immediately?
What if we acknowledged that some environments harmed us?
What if we stopped forcing ourselves to laugh along just to prove we are easygoing, evolved, or resilient?
What if healing requires a little less performance and a little more screaming?
Take care, visionaries.
Faye
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